Panasonic Air Conditioners (MQTT send receive)

[TassiRob]

Could you clarify. The keywords are to be used in conjunction with the physical installation of a ESP32 microcontroller for each AC unit? The keywords won’t work natively on a 5500SHAC with Modbus communication to the Panasonic SER8150 smart touch-screen room controller

[autoSteve]

I built that code for myself and shared it with #world as open source. I use ESP32 for A/C control out of Home Assistant and then extend that control to CBus devices via the automation controller.

I've no idea whether it would work with any other solution.

My air conditioners are dumb as a bagful of hammers, and have no fancy-pants smart touch screen room controller, nor modbus.

At the time I put that code together I was sick to my back teeth of the Panasonic Internet service randomly going down and causing Panasonic's own 'smart' integration to be useless. Unreliable is worse than something totally broken. I used to have the "cloud" integrated modules installed, but I sacked them because my use case was automatically cooling my "server room" when needed (AKA the shed).

On a couple of hot days things failed dismally, and my gear got stressed. I found it better to extend the life of $15k worth of server and network gear and stop my vinyl collection warping than piss around with unreliable crap supposedly "smart" technology via a 3rd party.

The less "cloud" the better, hence Home Assistant.

Maybe the "Comfort Cloud" has improved? A quick "ask Google" just now says, "Better. But still not reliable."

[TassiRob]

Thanks Steve for your excellent work. I’m a complete novice with both home assistant and cbus, so it’s been quite the learning curve. Without your code I would not have started down the rabbit hole of HA. Got my lights and fans hooked up a couple of months ago and now embarked on esp32 projects too. Finally decided to try and get our Panasonic linked up to HA. If I’m successful I’ll add the details in here in case it’s useful to others. I’m still hopeful that I’ll be able to get it working without resorting to adding esp32’s.

[autoSteve]

You are absolutely correct, @TassiRob.

ESP32 interface chats with the Panasonic. This is maintained by ESPHome to bring localised control to Home Assistant.

The core capability in the acMqtt script enables things like this to be done from the Schneider AC side of things, which lives on an iPad on a wall out back. The automation controller is just an interface to interrogate and set values inside Home Assistant via MQTT.

My fork of esphome-panasonic-ac for ESPHome remains a fork of the (still maintained) parent because I added some capability that the repo. owner didn't seem at all interested in so I closed the PR. Fair enough.

[autoSteve]

It does utilise a proprietary serial communications protocol to interface with the Panasonic A/C, so any ESP implementation for your apartments utilising BACnet would be quite different. Investigate that. I'd be fascinated.

[TassiRob]

Well after a lot of to and fro with Google AI, I finally have a working card using your MQTT send receive script. Let me know if you want any details of the structure. Thanks again for sharing this resource. I sent a little thank you to your sponsorship link.

[TassiRob]

It’s almost as confusing trying to organize a payment on GitHub as coding. Initially discovered my card had expired, tried changing to PayPal and discovered that didn’t work. Finally added me new card details and the bank app is throwing a hissy about the payment (was it me). Anyway I’m trying again. Who knows you might get lucky and it will go through twice.

[autoSteve]

A heartfelt thank you, Rob.